Citizens Creek (41 page)

A burst of laughter came from the other room, and then the children’s giggles. Once more, Jake’s voice, and Ma’am and Elizabeth egging him on.

“You draw your power from Cow Tom, like water from a well,” Gramma Amy said quietly, “as do I. Our family needs that power too. Let it go. You won’t break.”

How much easier for Rose if she could talk to her grandmother, tell her about the torching of the Seminole villages. Her grandfather as murderer. If she could explain why she remained silent.

“But Grampa chose me,” Rose said, her voice small. Grampa Cow Tom had gifted her his shame, the darkness in his soul for
evermore twined in with his goodness, such that she didn’t know how to sort them out for herself, let alone for anyone else. Could Gramma Amy love Grampa Cow Tom the same if she told? Rose hated this burden. What started as a promise to her grandfather was now a way of being she couldn’t control.

“Let go the needs of a child,” Gramma Amy said. “You are equal to anyone. But if you think you’re not, you’re not.”

Gramma Amy didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. This was nothing to do with worthiness, but Rose accepted her grandmother’s words, burying ever deeper her grandfather’s shame beneath her own.

Chapter 57

AFTER A LONG
night in the barn at the spinning wheel, Rose looked forward to a hot meal and a bit of shut-eye before tackling the day. Elizabeth would already be up and had surely taken charge of the early morning kitchen by now, and started breakfast for the ranch hands. She’d need help with the children, especially Kindred and Jacob, unmanageable four-year-olds who made mischief everywhere. How different to have such male energy in the house, after so many generations of girl babies. She was blessed.

This wasn’t the first full night spent at the loom by lantern light, an activity that soothed her like no other, strangely peaceful despite the clack and bang of the shuttle wheel, with its added benefit of practicality, producing an end product of material she could use to sew clothes for the children or a new shirt for Jake or a dress for Elizabeth, or a piece to embroider for slip pillows. The last few months she’d had great trouble sleeping. No matter how early she turned in, or how tired she was, her hold on sleep broke after an hour or two abed, and she woke to vague, feverish memories of chased dreams gone uncaught.

She had made her own family, as her Grampa Cow Tom predicted; a successful husband, children, sturdy and strong, and her sister, radiant and plump, content with her new life with them. They’d made the ranch a going concern, with money padlocked and buried beneath the floorboards for when bad years came. Rose congratulated herself on fighting through that dark time with Jake.

Weary, Rose slipped into the house, picking at the stray wisps of fluff settled on her dress from the carded wool she’d spun. She heard
them before she saw them, Jake and Elizabeth, and although they whispered in frantic, low tones to each other, the words traveled across the distance as if meant for her ears alone.

“With child.”

There sometimes comes a moment of comprehension when everything clears at once, and although the reality was there waiting to be seen, the recognition remains murky, just below the surface. After, it seems impossible the truth had not revealed itself before. For Rose, one moment her sister was her greatest ally, and the next, her mortal enemy, with the utterance of those two damning words, and the immediate certainty that Jake was the father. She’d played the fool for the past two years, again, with her husband, with her children, with her life.

Rose came out of the shadow into the glow of the kitchen so they could see her. They stood close to one another, her sister and her husband, not touching, but with an intimacy that threatened to knock her to her knees.

“Whose baby?” she demanded. She needed to hear the words to force the reality.

Elizabeth looked to Jake, her fear so thick she reeked of it, and Rose needed no further confirmation. Alongside, Jake distanced himself slightly from Elizabeth, his eyes on Rose, a bear caught in a trap. Rose couldn’t stand still. She turned to flee, where, she didn’t know, but anywhere away from the sight of the two of them.

“Wait,” Jake said.

“Wait?” Rose asked. “Haven’t I waited too long?”

“I’ve only found out myself,” he said.

Rose didn’t dare look at Elizabeth, her rage too large to control. “My sister? You brought this to our ranch?”

“I’m sorry,” said Jake.

“It just . . . happened,” said Elizabeth. “A mistake. Please, Rose. I would never in my right mind hurt you. You’re everything to me.”

Rose bolted from the room, back to the barn. The tears came and she couldn’t choke them back, and after a time she stopped try
ing, letting them stream until the front of her dress was damp and her throat grown raw from her moans.

She heard the creak of the heavy barn door, and knew it was Jake, come to her. She didn’t interrupt the course of her mourning, crying out her agony until she was spent, and he waited, not far from where she had thrown herself on a bundle of hay. At one point he tried to come closer, but she stopped him with a look.

When at last she thought her voice steady enough, she turned her face to her husband.

“Choose,” she said.

Midwifing came naturally to Rose, trained from the time she was a little girl by her Gramma Amy, but there was nothing natural about the prospect of delivering Elizabeth’s child by Jake. Elizabeth waited in her bedroom alone, labor progressing, while Rose lingered on the other side of the door, steeling herself to go in. Rose knew her sister was terrified by the prospect of delivering her first baby, and equally terrified that her only source of comfort and help came in the form of a sister who had barely spoken to her or looked her in the eye since the day the nature of the relationship between Jake and Elizabeth came to light.

The tools of her trade were carefully laid out beside the bed, cleaned and checked just that morning when labor first started, but try as she might, Rose couldn’t force herself to go in to Elizabeth. She knew her job, the job of every midwife. Not only assist in the delivery of a baby but gain the trust of the mother, assuring her that as midwife, she understood her craft and all would be well. But that seemed impossible in this circumstance.

The last few months had been hell on earth, watching Elizabeth bloom to readiness, the child taking on burgeoning shape under her tunic. Each day, Rose blocked her ears to Elizabeth’s appeals, gaining strength from the righteousness of her own pain-filled silences until Elizabeth, beaten, retreated back into silences of her
own. Jake’s frequent absences made things easier. Still, Rose played over and over in her mind the image of the two of them together, unable to stop herself. But with Jake gone, Rose went about her daily tasks and focused all of her wordless anger in one direction. Elizabeth.

She pulled up the floorboard in her bedroom, hers and Jake’s, wrenched out the heavy strongbox, and fit the key in the lock. Inside were items precious to her, documents, gold, silver, and in the corner, a cream-colored linen handkerchief twisted into a double knot, identical to one Elizabeth possessed. She wasn’t sure where Elizabeth kept her totem, but of all the valuables that might go missing through flood or fire or theft, this was the only thing she could never replace. Rose unknotted the handkerchief and held the single penny her Grampa Cow Tom had given her in her palm. She held the coin so tightly and so long that her hand began to ache. Carefully, when she felt herself ready, she returned the penny to the handkerchief, drew the knot taut, and put the strongbox back in its hiding place.

She knew she must do what had to be done.

Rose entered the room set up for the birthing and closed the door tight behind her.

Chapter 58

ROSE CIRCLED THE
front room and peered out the window, waiting. Elizabeth still sat in a rocking chair on the front stoop of the ranch house, handkerchief in hand, sniffling. Every once in a while, she broke into great sobs, shoulders heaving, producing fresh tears from her red-rimmed eyes. Her belongings lay piled in various bags and pouches at her feet, and she wore her best dress, the stiff gingham with both hoop and bustle, as if a proper lady, not a twenty-five-year-old child of the prairie who at one time picked out undigested kernels of corn from horse droppings for nourishment in order to survive.

Jacob and Kindred played in the packed dirt of the front yard, each intent in their separate games. They often played in just this way, not exactly together, but so aware of the other that if one walked away, the other followed, not far behind.

“Auntie Lizbeth,” Jacob called out, and held up his hoop for her comment. When she didn’t respond, Kindred padded over to where she sat and laid his head in her lap. She stroked his hair, absently, and sobbed afresh.

How often in the past had Rose softened to her younger sister’s tears, until she came to recognize any wellspring of concern only served to engulf her by the end? She refused to be fooled this time. She returned to hands and knees, hard-scrubbing the planks of the front room floor, only leaving off once she heard the approach of the cart’s wheels on the gravel path outside the ranch house door, the whinny of the fatigued horse, the harsh set of the hand brake as wood scraped wood. Still, she waited indoors.

“C’mon, dear,” she heard Gramma Amy say to Elizabeth, her voice more kind than Rose thought Elizabeth had a right to expect. Certainly more kindness than Rose intended.

“I’m not leaving without my child,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was surprisingly strong.

Rose gave her sister credit. Defiant to the end, even as she was thrown to the mercy of family who would still have her.

“That cannot be,” said Gramma Amy. Rose heard a new weariness. Her grandmother had seen too much, lived through too much. “We talked of this already and agreed. You promised your mother. Six months to weaning.”

“He’s mine, not hers.”

“She has a claim,” said Gramma Amy. “As you know.”

“I am the boy’s mother. He came from my body. Help me, Gramma. Please. It wasn’t only me to fault.”

“And mistakes carry a price. Six months come and gone. Grab hold to your things and get to the wagon. We’re going home.”

“My home is with Eugene.”

“Not here,” said Gramma Amy. “Not anymore.”

Heavy-booted footsteps and then a thudding on the flatbed. Her grandmother must have asked a ranch hand to help load the wagon. Rose refused to hide herself any longer, not on her own ranch, the ordeal almost to an end.

From today, they would all move forward again, without the constant pall of reminder. The awkward silences, the accusations, the sickening aftermath of betrayal, the pleas for forgiveness, all relegated now to a tapestry of the past. She gathered up the baby from the crib in the corner, still drowsy with sleep, and stepped out onto the stoop. The sun was bright, and although a harsh glare rendered her sister a squinted obscurity, she took great care
to affect calm and stare in that direction, as if made of stone. In this last year, she had decided stone was the safest state of mind around Elizabeth.

“Gramma Amy,” Rose said in greeting.

“Rose.”

Her grandmother walked toward the stoop in a slow, halting gait. From uncovered head to moccasined foot, she looked brittle and ancient. Her hair was totally white, in thin, coarse plaits curled tightly at the back of her neck, and she’d lost weight. She limped as she moved, the lameness more pronounced than when Rose saw her last, two months prior when she traveled to her grandfather’s ranch to bring her case before the family. Ma’am. Her grandmother. Gramma Amy’s sunken cheeks highlighted her wrinkled, sun-baked skin. Instead of fishing and dozing in the sun, surrounded by children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, now she started over with a wayward, man-stealing granddaughter.

“The child?” Gramma Amy asked, holding out her hands.

“Of course.”

Rose transferred Eugene to her grandmother’s arms. He was awake now, and before long would cry in hunger. They needed to make this brief. Rose might be stone, but had no interest in this kind of cruelty, in the spectacle of a baby crying for mother’s milk as the mother was forced to keep her breast from him.

Gramma Amy fingered the features of Eugene’s face. Already he showed promise of a pretty child with delicate features, the cocoa of his smooth skin a perfect blend of Jake’s light and Elizabeth’s dark, his hair a mass of ebony curls, a sunny disposition doubled-dipped from both. Six months ago, Rose played dutiful midwife to her sister, Elizabeth’s young body needing minimal assistance, a fast birth. Eugene was a good baby, an easy baby, as if he’d decided early he didn’t want to make undue trouble for anyone.

Eugene started to fuss, and Elizabeth bolted from the wagon.

“No,” commanded Gramma Amy. Elizabeth stopped, the plea
on her face plain. But she didn’t come closer, tightly wrapped arms around her chest as if hugging herself. She stood, unsure.

Rose put herself in Elizabeth’s place. If one of her children needed her, especially a helpless baby of six months, nothing and no one could stop her. Not man nor woman nor beast. Certainly not one single word spoken, no matter by whom. Elizabeth was weak.